If our new president intends to try to make America resemble what it was meant to be, he will have to deal with the noxious residue of the Bush-Cheney war against terrorism. Barack Obama will be confronted, as Harold Reynolds predicted in the October 29 New York Law Journal, with bringing justice to “thousands of . . . men and women cut off from access to their families, tortured, humiliated . . . and kept off stage to this day by Bush’s resistant administration.”

Among these purported menaces to national security are survivors, if they can be found, of CIA secret prisons (“black sites”); victims of CIA kidnapping renditions; and American citizens locked up indefinitely as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

We have one such pariah right here in New York at the Metropolitan Correction Center. He is 28-year-old Sayed Fahad Hashmi, whom I first told you about in this column last week. Confined in extreme isolation as if he were in a supermax prison, Hashmi was put away about a year ago by Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey under what are euphemistically called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs).

Of the 201,000 prisoners presently in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, fewer than 50 are so dangerous to the state that they are held under SAMs, which can be imposed in one-year increments. Mukasey was supposed to inform Hashmi’s lawyer, Sean Maher, on October 29 whether those fierce conditions that were described here last week would be renewed for another year. But as of this writing, no word has come from the Justice Department, and the keys to Hashmi’s cell will soon be in the hands of Barack Obama’s attorney general. When Jeanne Theoharis—a professor of political science at Brooklyn College who has been leading the campaign to get Hashmi out of the cage where he’s been jammed for his daily one hour of “recreation”—asked a Bureau of Prisons staff member how Hashmi has been SAM’d without even being charged with violence, she was told curtly: “He’s being charged with terrorism, right?”

My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy’s murder.

This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose “professionalism” and “objectivity” carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that “government should care for those who cannot care for themselves” and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people’s countries.

Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.

That is the subtext of Barack Obama’s “oratory”. He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama’s election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. “liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them”) but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the “bailout” of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.

Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, a frequent traveler who wears a robe and the traditional amamah headwear of a Shi’a leader, is accustomed to scrutiny at international airports.

But he was not prepared for what happened to him on Oct. 22 as he returned to Detroit Metropolitan Airport from an extended trip to his native Iran. After searching his luggage, customs personnel wanted to see more.

“They said, ‘Well, we need to check your computer,’ ” Elahi recalled. “They said they had to go to an office and check it. They came back and said, ‘Well, do the password.’ … He took it back, and it took another 20 minutes. And then he came back and said, ‘Well, you know, unfortunately, the computer died as I was looking at it.’ ”

Elahi was confronted with what many local Muslims and residents of Arab descent say are increased searches and seizures of laptops at airports and border crossings without warrant or warning. Civil rights groups are challenging the tactic, as the Bush administration and citizens continue to grapple with the conflict between civil liberties and national security seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A Museum of Tolerance built on top of a Muslim Cemetery in Jerusalem? Hard to Believe?

It must be stopped!!!!

Join the Campaign

Can you even imagine the possibility of the State of Israel and the Jerusalem municipality building a Museum of Tolerance on the site of a Muslim Cemetery in the heart of Jerusalem? Well it is happening. We tried to fight it in court but we lost. Imagine what would happen if someone in Europe – in Germany or Austria for instance, tried to build a Museum of Tolerance on top of Jewish graves.

The legal battle has been lost, now we must move on to the political battle. We must prevent this museum from being built on that site. Jerusalem will never be a city of peace if this is allowed to move forward.

Jerusalem is the one city in the world where there is a real potential to demonstrate that Jews, Christians and Muslims can live together in peace, understanding and real tolerance. Jerusalem is the place where we can learn to celebrate the diversities of our civilizations. If the construction of this museum is allowed to resume on top of a Muslim cemetery of religious and historical importance in the center of Jerusalem, this Holy city, will never realize its potential.

For the peace of Jerusalem, for the chance of peace, understanding and tolerance between Jews, Muslims and Christians we must stop this dangerous act.

We call on the Government of Israel and the Municipality of Jerusalem to stop the construction of the Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in name of public safety and in protection of the reputation of the State of Israel and the safety of Jews all around the world.

We call on Jerusalemites, Israelis and Palestinians to join our campaign.

We call on the candidates for Mayor of Jerusalem and for the Jerusalem City Council to speak out during the remaining days of the campaign – promise us that you won’t let this Museum be built in the Mamilla Cemetery.

We call on the Chief Rabbis of Israel not to let this shame on Judaism take place. In the name of Judaism, do not allow this Museum to built on top of Muslim graves.

We call on Israelis and Palestinians alike to send letters to your Presidents, Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers urging them to stop the construction of the Museum in that location.

We call on Jews all over to write to the Wiesenthal Center Director Rabbi Hier urging him to change the location of the Museum. We urge Jews everywhere to write to the Government of Israel voice your objection to building a Museum of Tolerance on top of Muslim graves.

We call on Rabbis around the world to join the campaign. We are looking for several Rabbis who will coordinate organizing a Rabbis letter against the building of the Museum over Muslim graves.

We call on citizens of the world to join the campaign – raise your voices, – write to your own governments urging them to pressure the Israeli government to cease the construction of the Museum in that location.

ISRAEL’S SUPREME COURT RULES CENTER FOR HUMAN DIGNITY-MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE JERUSALEM CAN BUILD ON WEST JERUSALEM SITE

The Israeli High Court of Justice has ruled that the building of the Museum is legal and the construction can continue. In February 2006 the High Court issued an injunction for freezing the construction. Since that time the Court has been considering the evidence presented for and against building the Museum. The decision of the Court places the burden on the Muslim Authorities to accept the “offers” made to them by the Wiesenthal Center to move the graves that will be affected by the building the Museum. The Muslim Authorities rejected all of the offers and claimed that the sanctity of the whole cemetery must be respected. In the initial groundbreaking and first construction some 300 skeletons were dug up and “boxed” by the Israeli Antiquities Authorities.

Furthermore, the Court rejected the claims by some experts (supported by IPCRI and others against the building of the Museum) and in favor of other experts brought by the Wiesenthal Center, that the construction of the Museum would not lead to a disruption of public order and that the Arab and Muslim world would accept the construction of the Museum as they had accepted the construction of the parking lot over part of the Museum in the mid 1960’s.

The Islamic Movement in Israel vowed to fight a Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday that a Museum of Tolerance could be built on its planned site in central Jerusalem even though it was part of the old, deconsecrated Mamila Muslim cemetery.

Work on the $250-million museum, which is being built adjacent to Independence Park by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, hit a snag three years ago when dozens of Muslim graves were found on a section of the site during the required preliminary excavations. Two years ago, a court ordered a freeze in construction.

The museum said Wednesday that construction would resume immediately.

But a showdown is expected, with the Islamic group set to announce its plans at a press conference in east Jerusalem on Thursday morning.

“All citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, are the real beneficiaries of this decision,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center. “Moderation and tolerance have prevailed.”

In their unanimous ruling, the justices noted that no objections had been lodged back in 1960, when the municipality put a parking lot over a small section of the graveyard, and that for the past half-century the site had been in public use.

The court said that an alternative proposal put forward by planners – including reburial of the bones or covering the graves – was “satisfactory” in trying to reconcile religious attitudes toward respecting the dead with the requirements of the law.

The court also noted that the Islamic organization that had filed the appeal, Al-Aksa Foundation, which is connected with the Islamic Movement, was declared illegal by Public Security Minister Avi Dichter earlier this year for its alleged ties with Hamas. Nevertheless, the court found, this in itself was not grounds to reject the appeal.

The court also said concerns that violence would break out if the construction went ahead were “not within the confines” of the ruling.

The decision came after seven months of arbitration failed to resolve the dispute.

An attempt to reach an out-of-court settlement broke down when Islamic officials rejected an offer by the museum to move the bones to a nearby neglected Muslim cemetery and to renovate it. The Wiesenthal Center refused to relocate the museum or to avoid construction on the small section of the site where the bones were found, saying the area was needed for the museum.

The bones, several hundred years old, were found on 12 percent of the site.

Islamic officials, who had repeatedly ruled out any construction at the site, criticized Wednesday’s ruling.

“We did not expect much from the court, and it is clear that it is part of the Israeli establishment,” Islamic Movement spokesman Zahi Nujidat said. “We will not give up easily.”

In the past, public protests organized by the movement have turned violent.

The museum was originally expected to be completed in 2007. The Wiesenthal Center has spent millions of dollars in legal fees.

Hier said construction would take between three and three-and-a-half years.

According to the court’s decision, construction can resume immediately, except for the small section where the human remains were found.

The court gave project managers 60 days to agree with the Antiquities Authority on a method for either removing any human remains for reburial or installing a barrier between the building’s foundations and the ground below that would prevent graves from being disturbed.

The site was the city’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948.

The Wiesenthal Center has cited rulings by Muslim courts, the most recent in 1964, that canceled the sanctity of the site because it was no longer used.

Hier said that the site, which was given to the center by the Israel Lands Administration and the Jerusalem Municipality in the ’90s, had never been designated by Israeli authorities as a cemetery, and that for three decades it had been used as parking lot.

He added that throughout the Arab world, including in the Palestinian Authority, there had been extensive building on abandoned cemetery sites.

The museum construction site was dedicated with great fanfare in 2004, with top government officials and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in attendance.

The museum – which is being designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry and will include a theater complex, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls – seeks to promote unity and respect among people of all faiths.

“Jerusalem is 3,000 years old, and every stone and parcel of land has a history that is revered by people of many faiths,” Hier said. “We are deeply committed to do everything in our power to respect this sacred past, but at the same time, we must allow Jerusalem to have a future.”

From the Weisenthal Center Web site:

“All citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, are the real beneficiaries of this decision.” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauded today’s Israeli Supreme Court decision allowing the Frank O. Gehry-designed Center for Human Dignity – Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem (MOTJ) to be built on its planned site in the center of the city. “All citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, are the real beneficiaries of this decision,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Moderation and tolerance have prevailed. The MOTJ will be a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.” Construction on the project will resume immediately.
(cllick on above photo for hi-res image)

“Jerusalem is 3,000 years old and every stone and parcel of land has a history that is revered by people of many faiths. We are deeply committed to do everything in our power to respect that sacred past, but at the same time, we must allow Jerusalem to have a future and we are honored to be given an opportunity to be a part of that future,” Rabbi Hier concluded.

Jews outraged by construction
at site of famed Vilnius cemetery
By Dinah A. Spritzer

PRAGUE (JTA) — Jews inside and outside of Vilnius are outraged at Lithuanian officials who have allowed construction on land believed to cover part of the country’s largest Jewish cemetery.

Development of the King Mindaugas apartments is the second building project in two years that authorities have allowed on the area, one of the Lithuanian capital’s prime real estate sites.

The city in May reportedly agreed to an international expert committee’s recommendation that construction on the site be halted and that a geophysical survey be carried out in the disputed area. But construction has continued nonetheless.

“The government is playing a game with us, saying one thing and doing another,” Simon Gurevichius, executive director of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, told JTA in a telephone interview.

Gurevichius said Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus promised the Jewish community that a second building would not go up, “and meanwhile the digging is going on at a frantic pace where we know there are Jewish bones.”

Estimates put the number of those buried at the Snipiskes Cemetery at some 10,000 over six centuries, although many bodies were removed by the Soviet regime when it controlled Lithuania. Prior to World War II, Vilnius was one of European Jewry’s most vital centers of religious life and education.

The city first sold part of a vast tract of land in the city center, occupied in part by the cemetery, to a local developer in 2003. Despite complaints by the 5,000-strong Jewish community, the city in 2005 allowed the construction of an apartment complex. Gurevichius estimates that apartment prices start at $400,000.

This February, the city granted a second building permit after receiving permission from the Ministry of Culture, which has the power to stop projects that interfere with ancient sites and ruins.

Based on archival research it commissioned, the city argued that the current construction does not overlap with the cemetery grounds.

After pressure and intervention from international voices such as the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius and the American Jewish Committee, the Lithuanian Prime Minister’s Office agreed in March to an expert committee of Jewish leaders, government officials and members of the historical institute that would try to resolve the boundary dispute.

The state-run Lithuanian Historical Institute declared in May that the construction area in question does encroach on the cemetery’s borders, but its recommendation to stop construction has been ignored. In an apparent bureaucratic snafu that Gurevichius attributes to ill will, the city and state authorities claim they are not following the institute document because it lacks the proper signatures.

Ina Irens, chief officer of the Vilnius municipal government’s international relations department, wrote JTA by e-mail that the city was aware of the controversy on the cemetery boundaries and was still waiting for the expertise from the Lithuanian Institute of History and the final document from the panel of experts.

The document in question was signed by the institute’s director, Gurevichius said, but one copy lacks the signatures of the two researchers who helped him. Now he worries that in a few months, the apartment building will be completed and the city will say, “It’s here now, it would just cost too much to tear it down,” Gurevichius said.

Andrew Baker, director of international relations for the American Jewish Committee, said the expert group’s 10 members — half of whom were Lithuanian — unanimously recommended that construction be halted until further research was conducted.

Baker said he told Lithuanian officials, including the foreign minister, that “this is an unacceptable response and surely the government could do more. It is hard not to conclude that the Lithuanian government has acted in bad faith.”

While the wrangling continues in Vilnius, the London-based Committee to Protect Jewish Cemeteries in Europe is convinced that the ongoing apartment construction, according to its own research in Vilnius, is disrupting the dead, which is a violation of Jewish law.

The cemetery committee, the Conference of European Rabbis and some 100 observant Jews held a prayer vigil in front of the European Commission in Brussels last week to protest the construction.

Abraham Ginsberg, the executive director of the cemetery committee, said: “We will protest at Lithuanian embassies around Europe, and men in black hats and long beards will lay down on the site if the construction does not stop.”

The sovereignty of an independent, stable country that has carried out many constructive moves in recent months and weeks, which could have surely contributed to the stabilization of the Middle East, has been violated, its borders breached and its civilians killed.

But when the country targeted is Syria, an Arab country, and the perpetrator is the US military, then, somehow things are not as appalling as they may seem.

The US raid on a small farming community near the Iraq-Syria border on October 26 is being treated differently than the Russian attack on Georgia in August 2008. The latter was vehemently condemned by every last leading US official, who specifically decried Russia’s violation of international law, laws governing the sovereignty of nations, and the destabilization of a whole region. Few in the US government, and fewer in the ever-willing mainstream media, dared offer any alternative reading to what truly triggered the conflict. For example, Georgia’s initial violent attacks on South Ossetia, killing many Russian citizens and peacekeepers, seemed a negligible fact. full article: www.insight-info.com

That Barack Obama trounced John McCain last Tuesday should have surprised no one. In fact, in this column, weeks ago, I stated emphatically that John McCain could no more beat Barack Obama than Bob Dole could beat Bill Clinton. He didn’t. (Hence a vote for John McCain was a “wasted” vote, was it not?) I also predicted that Obama would win with an electoral landslide. He did. The real story, however, is not how Barack Obama defeated John McCain. The real story is how John McCain defeated America’s conservatives.

For all intents and purposes, conservatism–as a national movement–is completely and thoroughly dead. Barack Obama did not destroy it, however. It was George W. Bush and John McCain who destroyed conservatism in America.

Soon after G.W. Bush was elected, it quickly became obvious he was no conservative. On the contrary, George Bush has forever established himself as a Big-Government, warmongering, internationalist neocon. Making matters worse was the way Bush presented himself as a conservative Christian. In fact, Bush’s portrayal of himself as a conservative Christian paved the way for the betrayal and ultimate destruction of conservatism (something I also predicted years ago). And the greatest tragedy of this deception is the way that Christian conservatives so thoroughly (and stupidly) swallowed the whole Bush/McCain neocon agenda.

Why does Israel continue to build settlements on the west bank and continue its expansionist policies? The ultimate goal is to capture all of ‘Eretz Israel’. The ‘Promised Land’ extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, a bit of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Yasser Arafat always used to keep an Israeli coin in his pocket showing Israel with the ‘Eretz Israel’ borders, to remind people that they shouldn’t be fooled by the Zionists, as they have no defined borders and continue to expand their land.

Islam and revolutions that have sprung forth from Islam in all ages have been in danger of enemies and an attack by arrogant powers. This principle continues today as well.

In must be observed in regards to arrogant powers that they are not exclusive to particular people or a particular group. They cannot be considered to only be from one or two countries. Rather, they include individuals, organizations, and political parties who are open enemies of Islam. Because of their expansion they have been entitled the world arrogant powers.

Secondly, the enmity that the arrogant powers have with Islam started from the age of the Noble Prophet (s) and this groups enmity has severely increased with the internationalization and spread of Islam. They were always at war with the Prophet and his companions at all times; when the prophet had power and before he had power.

In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after “a Lehi combatant who was killed” — i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir’s terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte.

In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day’s Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled “Don’t pin much hope on Obama — Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message”. This editorial referred to the Irgun as a “terror organization” (a judgment call) and concluded: “Far from challenging Israel, the new team may turn out to be as pro-Israel as the one it is replacing.”

That was always likely. Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as “a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning”, and America’s electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president’s declaring his country’s independence from Israeli domination.full article: www.insight-info.com

CHICAGO: After the euphoria of his historic election win, Barack Obama got down Thursday to choosing a presidential team that faces a mountain of problems, not least the economic crisis and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrat dodged the limelight after being elected America’s first black president, but behind-the-scenes activity picked up with the formal creation of a team to handle his transition to power ahead of the January 20 inauguration.

In an immediate reminder of the mammoth task ahead, the Dow Jones share average plummeted nearly 500 points Wednesday on resurgent fears of a deep recession. This was followed by large sell-offs and a raft of negative financial data in Asia and Europe.

Democrats said Obama had asked combative Congressman and former Bill Clinton White House aide Rahm Emanuel, 48, to be his chief of staff, a vital post that helps set the tempo of the administration.

Israeli media on Thursday hailed Barack Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, with one daily calling the Democrat of Israeli descent “our man in the White House.”

Radio stations and newspapers pointed out Emanuel’s Jerusalem-born father was once a member of Irgun, an ultra-nationalist Jewish terror group behind such slaughters of civilians as the bombing of the King David hotel which killed 92 people in 1946.

Emanuel himself volunteered to serve in the Israeli Army and did a two-month stint at a base in northern Israel during the 1991 Gulf war, public radio reported.

“It is obvious he will exert influence on the president to be pro-Israeli,” Emanuel’s father, who moved to the US in the 1960s, told the Maariv daily.

The newspaper headlined the article: “Our man in the White House.”

While Clinton, the last Democrat in the White House, took weeks to announce his Cabinet, Obama does not have the luxury of time as more than a trillion dollars is dispensed to bail out Wall Street.

Obama has hinted at possible names to take over as treasury secretary.

He noted to CNN last week that his economic advisers include Clinton’s last Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, 53, as well as former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker, 81, and mega-rich investor Warren Buffett, 78.